Australian Integration into Palantir’s Global Surveillance Panopticon Is Not Inevitable

Data analytics multinational Palantir Technologies is building an artificial intelligence-driven surveillance panopticon. The US company provides intelligence operating systems to government and private entities globally, and it is feeding the raw data it sources into its central data-integration systems. And while this includes Australian data, that doesn’t have to be the case.

Just last, week the Spanish government ordered that state-controlled and private entities end their use of Palantir products, due to growing concerns about the potential for classified national security information to be misused, and whether that might jeopardise national sovereignty. This move mirrors recent concerns aired in both France and Germany about dealings with the US company.

Yet the Spanish Ministry of Defence is seeking to renew its contract with Palantir, as it considers that its Gotham data analytics platform is superior.

The Australian Defence Force has been using Palantir systems since 2011. In February this year, Palantir secured its largest ever contract with the ADF, which was worth over $10 million, and it facilitated local military use of the company’s ICT System Platform.

Palantir was founded by US tech investor Peter Thiel circa 2004, and its face is CEO Alex Karp. Its first investor was CIA venture capital nonprofit In-Q-Tel. In fact, Palantir’s only client until 2008 was the CIA. And the company was established around the same time that US Congress blocked a Pentagon initiative to build an all-pervasive surveillance system post-9/11 called Total Information Awareness.

Thiel is closely connected to the Trump White House, which has recently been tearing down barriers to sharing data across systems and also seeking access to Australian biometric information. And while this nation’s relationship with the US makes integration into this vast surveillance network appear inevitable, last week’s Spanish example reveals that it’s not too late to pull out.

Eradicating the private

Palantir is Thiel’s brainchild, and he asked university pal Karp to join him in the venture. After the pair met with the Pentagon official who was behind its shelved “all-seeing eye” proposal, CIA funding for the private company was forthcoming, as was the assistance of the foreign intelligence agency’s analysts in the company’s early days, in order to tweak Palantir products.

Thiel says he’s a libertarian, but to him this ultimately means individual liberty for billionaires living within an authoritarian system. Shortly after Palantir’s incorporation, Thiel invested in Facebook. US journalist Whitney Webb posits that the Pentagon had also been developing a similar idea known as LifeLog post 9/11. And Thiel is also the key reason that JD Vance is the current US vice president.

Tech trillionaire Elon Musk was invited by the second Trump administration to head up DOGE (the Department of Government Efficiency) in early 2025, and he was tossed the keys to US federal government databases, so he could cut services and staff. And incidentally, Thiel and Musk secured their fortunes when they sold off PayPal, the company they both headed at the turn of the century.

Gotham was launched in 2008, and US military and intelligence agencies began using it. This platform also has a focus on predictive policing. The US government has invested in Palantir since the Bush administration. However, under Trump’s first term in office, it garnered many new contracts, and Thiel financially backed the first two Trump presidential campaigns, along with Vance’s entire career.

So, it was against this backdrop that Trump signed a 20 March 2025 executive order that removed the barriers between US government “data silos”, so that information could be shared, which Palantir can then utilise to generate new data points via its AI platforms. And the New York Times reports that the White House has already sought hundreds of fresh data points relating to various people.

Integrating the antipodeans

Gotham is the main intelligence platform that Palantir has developed for government, defence and intelligence services, whilst 2015-launched Foundry is for commercial purposes. The Australian government has been increasingly incorporating Palantir systems since 2011, whilst local private companies, like Rio Tinto and WesTrac, started to use the data mining tech in 2021.

Australian government entities that have incorporated Palantir include the Australian Defence Force, the Australian Criminal Intelligence Agency, AUSTRAC, and the Australian Signals Directorate. Crikey reports that Palantir staff are embedded in the Department of Defence and have access to critical infrastructure. But Defence denies its key systems are connected to Palantir AI functionality.

Digital Rights Watch warns that as Palantir systems are operating across Australian government departments and private companies, including Coles since 2024, there are no guarantees or restrictions on how the Miami headquartered entity is itself using or storing this data, even though one of its key aims is to break down barriers to secure new information.

The Trump administration has recently requested that Australia provides access to the biometric information and identity details relating to all Australians, so that this nation’s citizens can be a part of the US Visa Waiver Program, which allows individuals from certain countries to enter the US for up to 90 days without a visa. And it appears that Canberra has agreed to this arrangement.

During a 27 May 2026 Senate estimates hearing, Greens Senator David Shoebridge quizzed representatives from the Department of Home Affairs about whether the Albanese government would ensure that the US government does not feed this sensitive personal data about Australian citizens into Palantir systems, but none of them could guarantee that this wouldn’t happen.

Indeed, after no clear answer was forthcoming from the department, Shoebridge said that he’d understood their answer to be that “Home Affairs isn’t developing a general policy about whether global big tech bottom feeders, like Palantir, can get access to Australians’ data”.

Alternatives do exist

As revelations about Palantir systems continue to be unveiled, there is a general sense that Australian systems and databases will inevitably end up being incorporated into the US company’s all-pervasive surveillance panopticon, in a similar way to how this country’s military is becoming increasingly interoperable, or being swallowed up, by the US military.

But as the recent decision in Spain reveals our nation could blacklist the use of Palantir systems and look for local alternatives.

French prime minister Sébastien Lecornu announced last month that his nation’s domestic security agency was ending its contract with Palantir and it has rather awarded it to French data company ChapsVision, whilst Germany’s security agency announced in May that it would be sourcing new software from ChapsVision as well, instead of Palantir, in order to guarantee its national sovereignty.

“There’s a growing sense of concern amongst the Australian public about the reach of these far-right big tech companies from the United States,” Senator Shoebridge told Home Affairs representatives during estimates in May.

The Australian Greens member had further suggested in April that the nation ought to impose a blanket ban on further Palantir products “pending a comprehensive public audit of their existing government agreements”.

“Some of these big tech companies that your government is contracting with are publishing far-right political manifestos online, saying they basically want to become a tool of the US military, in a culture war for the United States, and you’re entering multimillion-dollar contracts with them,” Shoebridge further put to Home Affairs.

Main image: Peter Thiel by Gage Skidmore is licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0. Palantir logo is in the public domain.